I had two initial reactions to reports about this survey. The first was cynical: the inability of Americans to articulate the particularities of even their own religious faith sort of confirms the isomorphism of American religion—that the “religion” of this “deeply religious” country is, at the end of the day, just a functional deism necessary to sustain American civil religion.

My second reaction was more critical, and perhaps more charitable: I continue to be suspicious of such surveys and reports precisely because they reduce religion to “knowledge.” … But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.

In this vein, I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules.

These are wise words, but their applicability varies, I think, depending on what kind of religious knowledge we’re talking about. Can one be a serious believer without understanding (or caring much about) some of the more abstruse debates in your faith’s theological tradition? Of course. Can one be a serious Christian without knowing that Jonathan Edwards was associated with the First Great Awakening, or a pious Jew who doesn’t know that Maimonides was Jewish? Most certainly — and many of the Pew Forum’s questions fall into exactly this category, testing a kind of historical literacy (or a multicultural literacy, in the case of questions about other faiths) that doesn’t necessarily relate to the way religion is lived and experienced.

But can one be a serious Christian without being able to name the four Gospels, a feat that only 57 percent of Protestants and 33 percent of Catholics could manage? Well, yes, I think so — but there things get a bit more complicated, surely, and you could be forgiven for wondering to what extent a “social imaginary” can be sustained amid widespread ignorance of what seem like some pretty basic facts. And then, to, push things a bit further: Can one be a serious practitioner of Catholic Christianity who doesn’t know (as 41 percent of Catholics in the Pew survey did not) that the Church teaches that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist, rather than just symbolizing and memorializing Christ’s sacrifice? (Note I’m not even talking about whether you believe in transsubstantiation here — just whether you know that it’s what the Church says is happening on the altar.) There I think the answer is probably no: At a certain very basic level, what you know about a religion and how you practice it go hand in hand, and you can’t really be “a master of the game” if you’re ignorant of its rules — in the same way, say, that you couldn’t be a great baseball player if you didn’t know that three strikes make an out. (Yes, I know, Manny Ramirez might be the exception …)

Not every Pew question was pitched at this basic level. But enough were, and enough American believers flunked them, to suggest that Smith’s initial, cynical reaction had at least a certain accuracy about it.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.